'Rock of Ages' wins its fight for the right to party

It doesn't take much to send the children of the 1980s into a bacchanalian frenzy. Based on the truly chaotic party scene inside the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Thursday night, you really don't need anything more than to hire a killer rock band, stick some beautiful young dancers in lingerie, crank out full-throated covers of "We're Not Gonna Take It," "Any Way You Want It" and "The Final Countdown," and include a make-out scene fueled by Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. When that sweet four-pack, that cheap talisman of Reagan-era youthful rebellion, made its humble appearance on the set of "Rock of Ages," the audience erupted with such an emotional frenzy of memory, it was as if some Bon Jovi-loving shrink had suddenly offered them a chance to relive their most heightened sensual experience. Only without all the hair in their mouths. Truly, I hadn't seen anything like that since "Mamma Mia!" sent a previous generation into a sticky disco high. And "Mamma Mia!" has grossed some $2 billion worldwide. That's not even counting the movie, which has snagged another $600 million or so to date. The movie rights have already been sold to "Rock of Ages," which opened last week on Broadway and could well be nearly as big, stateside anyway, as its silly 1970s predecessor. And whereas ground zero for "Mamma Mia!" was London (ABBA never toured much in the United States and American productions never had the same emotional force), "Rock of Ages" is an all-American retro experience that will be the most at home in the once-industrial Midwest, where Whitesnake, Poison and Journey once blared in suburban bedrooms from Upper Arlington, Ohio to Arlington Heights, Ill. Like "Mamma Mia!," "Rock of Ages" obeys the cardinal jukebox-musical rule of not taking itself seriously. It shoves the hits of the era into a cheerfully dumb original story -- this one involves a fictional L.A. rock club on the verge of being knocked down by nefarious German developers (or something like that), a romance between a cute waitress-actress just arrived from the Heartland (played by Amy Spanger) and a lovable, wannabe rock star from Michigan. This lead character is played, with dazzling vocal pyrotechnics, by the former "American Idol" dude Constantine Maroulis, who has belatedly learned that if you cut out the smoldering and vamping and spoof yourself a bit instead, people will like you a whole lot more. The events, which remind us that many of the mostly vanquished icons of the 1980s (alternative weeklies, mix tapes) will eventually be pedaled as nostalgia to retirees in Florida, are hosted by a genial, goofy, mullet-clad narrator named Lonny (Mitchell Jarvis). Lonny owes a great deal, to say the least, to characters created by Jack Black. He floats in and out of the music, Fogmaster 5000 in hand, like an MC at a cabaret of lovable losers. Unlike "Mamma Mia!" and, god knows, "Xanadu," "Rock of Ages" is managing to attract that rarest of species inside an American theater: the middle-class, heterosexual all-American male. I even overheard one who bought his own ticket (which are priced 15 percent to 20 percent below other Broadway shows) and talked his girlfriend into coming, instead of the other way around, which is how every other show gets sold. That's not just because "Rock of Ages" lets you drink at your seat -- you use casino chips to buy cans of Coors -- but mostly because the names of say, Whitesnake or Pat Benatar on the marquee do not induce rampant masculine sexual insecurity, although they probably should. In other words, by combining power ballads such as "I've Been Waiting" and "I Want to Know What Love Is" with the street cred of legitimate rock anthems such as "We Built This City," the show (book by Chris D'Arienzo) gets to poke fun at romantic ballads -- and thus attract the soft-rock crowd -- and also make it safe for former headbangers to show up from their mousy white-collar jobs and relive the only time in their lives when they actually felt a rush of power. Nobody has really put this era or style of music on the stage before. "The Wedding Singer," which comes from this era, screwed up by using sappy original music to which no one could relate. It died a terrible death. "Rock of Ages" will live on. For there's at least one other crucially important thing going on here. Sex. "Rock of Ages" doesn't sanitize the sexism of an era noted for objectification and images of bondage on album covers. Both the material and Kristin Hanggi's shrewd production sends it all up -- which is something entirely different, because sendups allow for the simultaneous enjoyment (if one is so inclined) of that which is being sent up. Nothing is more lucrative than old-fashioned rock voyeurism -- just look at the grosses of those old stadium tours. Those old habits are alive and well here, maintained and protected by a satirical veneer So it goes with this surely golden piece of rock, which, like the 1980s, gets to have it all kinds of ways. "Rock of Ages" plays at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th Street, New York.